What’s the most popular piece of footage to remix on the planet? Well it’s hard to say exactly. In the United States, the German film “Der Untergang” (the source for the infamous Hitler Downfall Parody videos) is a major contender but in Asia, there’s no doubt that the Chinese Red Army Choir wins. Take a look at the original footage of the choir playing the Long March Song Cycle (长征组歌) filmed in 1976.

The Red Army sync version of Michael Jackson’s hit “Beat It” is definitely the most popular with well over 10 million views on ToDou.com alone. (If videos don’t load re-fresh the page).

Beat It – The Red Army Version

Although a handful of ripped copies of the Red Army’s Beat It have made their way onto western sites like YouTube in recent weeks, the vast majority live on the Chinese site Tudou (土豆网) (which translated literally means “Potato Net”). It’s without a doubt one of the largest video sharing sites in the world – claiming to be about five time bigger than YouTube.

A quick search on ToDou.com for “Red Army Edition” (红军版) returns hundreds of remixes including this extensive playlist. Beyond Michael Jackson hits you can also see the Red Army Choir doing their rendition of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Usher as well as classic songs like American Idiot, We Will Rock You and Never Gonna Give You Up – all in varying remix quality. A few of our favorite “Red Army Versions” are posted below. (They may take some time to load but are worth it).

As for the deeper cultural meaning – perhaps these remixes serve as a commentary on Chinese government authoritarianism or on the virus-like nature of American corporate pop culture. Maybe they are just making fun of old Communist Party propaganda or perhaps it’s all of the above. Not being versed in Simplified Chinese, it’s hard to tell what the true intentions are, but the Red Army might very well be the most remixed video on the planet. Mao Zedong is undoubtedly spinning in his grave (perhaps even in sync to the music).

Poker Face (Lady Gaga)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Theme song)

Wavin’ Flag (Coca-Cola World Cup celebration mix)

Prague Square (布拉格廣場) by Taiwan stars Jay Chou & Jolin Tsai

Category: music video
Topic Tags: china, copyright, corporations, fair use, pop culture, pop music

Public Knowledge has just released their new series of four video interviews called “We Are Creators Too” that focuses on artists who push the boundaries of copyright law. First to be featured was Nina Paley whose Sita Sings the Blues feature film (set to music from the Public Domain) reveals the timelessness of an old Indian folk tale while simultaneously exposing the archaic nature of copyright. Francesca Coppa, fan, academic and keeper of women’s vidding herstory is also featured along with Jonathan and myself.

Public Knowledge is a great resource for remix artists and vidders because they acknowledge that Fair Use is a right, not a privilege. As artist, we can only continue making new work with the hopes that the product and process decreases copyright confusion and encourages the use of new media technologies to sustain media literacy and critical thinking about popular, and proprietary, culture.

Part 4 – Francesca Coppa

Part 3 – Jonathan McIntosh

Part 2 – Elisa Kreisinger

Part 1 – Nina Paley

Category: About Remixing
Topic Tags: activism, copyright, corporations, fair use, REMOVED, rights, television, vidding

Why it Takes Three Weeks to Post Your Youtube Video

In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots.

On July 21^st I posted a remix video to Youtube called “Super Pork and Beans All-Stars.” It was a remixed version of Weezer’s popular Pork and Beans music video, which is owned by Universal Music Group (UMG) – my version was made of new footage that I manipulated to match the song.

Immediately after the upload, Youtube’s copyright bots recognized the UMG song on my soundtrack and disabled my video. Youtube has a built-in online tool for copyright disputes, so I used that to tell them that my work was fair use and should not have been removed. My movie was put back online right away,  but the dispute process wasn’t over.

YouTube forwarded my dispute to UMG and I was surprised to find out that UMG replied back only a day later. They told Youtube that they owned the song and that I was not allowed to use it without permission. Such a quick response from UMG makes me suspect they’re using more bots to respond automatically to Youtube’s built-in disputes. After UMG’s response, my movie was automatically taken down once again.

Luckily for me I had already learned how to deal with this from Owen Gallagher, who runs totalrecut.com and has successfully fought other Youtube takedowns. On July 23^rd, I followed Owen’s example and sent Youtube a DMCA counter-notice. These counter-notices need to be formatted in a specific way to be considered legitimate, otherwise it’s at Youtube’s discretion whether or not they ignore you. You can find a guide to how the DMCA counter-notices work at Chillingeffects.org.

I was finally notified that my video was going back online on August 12^th — around 21 days after my original posting. A big chunk of that was spent waiting for UMG to meet their DMCA-imposed deadline to seek legal action against me if they found my video to be infringing. Thankfully, nobody has yet invented a bot that can take you to court, so the deadline lapsed and my video back went online, hopefully for good.

In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

So I got a happy ending, but imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek. How willing would I be to dig through Youtube’s site to find the automated dispute process? And once that automated dispute got rejected, how willing would I be to research the precise criteria required to send my counter-notice in a format that Youtube couldn’t ignore? And if I had to do this for multiple videos, and wait three weeks per submission, who could blame me for concluding that Youtube just wasn’t the place to reliably distribute my work?

Youtube is actually one of the more obliging sites for providing tools and instructions on how to exercise your fair use rights, but even there it’s a small research project for any user who may want to fight back. Meanwhile major labels aren’t even bothering to hire staff to make sure they’re not taking down legal videos. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued other content companies for abusing copyright in this way, but that has not been enough to deter the massive automated takedowns.

Others have already proposed an important step toward fixing this problem: replace the current “notice-and-takedown” laws with “notice-and-notice” ones. If UMG wants to take people’s videos down, users should have a chance to dispute it  before the content is removed. There should be no pressure on service providers to take down legal content. This ought to be a minimum, uncontroversial step, even if we put aside other legitimate arguments for expanding fair use and reducing copyright terms. Internet users should not have to fight uphill battles to keep legal videos online just so a handful of labels can save on staffing costs.

[This is a guest post for PRV by video remixer IKAT381]

Category: articles
Topic Tags: copyright, corporations, fair use

YouTube’s January 2009 Massacre hit many vidders using that video sharing site particularly hard because their Content ID system can not decipher between a copyright violation and a fair use of the original material. Last week fannish vidders found themselves caught in the midst of yet another online video massacre. Much of the vidding community had been using the media sharing site imeem which, until recently, had been a safe space for them to post fan works and share in fan communities. But imeem recently announced they were ‘simplifying’ their website and deleting all use- generated video (UGV), again leaving vidders without a community to upload and share their works. Imeem is now “de-emphasizing” UGV because of costs and concerns over their return on investment (ROI). They say “Simply put, there’s no ROI for us in UGV.”

We feel this is an insult to the vidding and other photo/video communities that helped build imeem as a service. We think that to simply jettison user generated creative works in this way due to profit margins is shameful and abhorrent.

The end of the vidding community on imeem does not just stop with the loss of the vids but also a deletion of all comments and playlists, loss of the cumulative hit counts and vidding network disruptions. To add insult to injury, imeem continues to prohibit users from downloading their own content. Some of the startling experiences and over-all mistreatment of content producers are documented here.

What this means for our blog is that many of our favorite vids will be offline until they can be relocated to other sites. Many of our favorites will be on blip.tv since they’ve implemented a fair use policy, this despite their recent vidder-targeted takedowns for posting “copyrighted material”. Others will be moving to BAM. A comparison of the two sites’ hosting capacities is posted here.

In caution to vidders transitioning away from imeem, Morgan Dawn has outlined the copyright policies of various video services. She adds “how they will handle the transformative nature of fan vids is still anyone’s guess.”

Please be patient with us as we try to find the new location of vids we have posted here over the past few months and update our posts accordingly. If you’ve found a vid’s new digital home, please let us know!

Category: News
Topic Tags: copyright, fair use, imeem youtube, vidding

A video remix to go along with the Negativland audio remix song “You Must Respect Copyright” using footage from Kubrick’s 2001. By someone calling themselves biginalbania.

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Category: short film
Topic Tags: copyright

This remix was created by artist Keir Smith in response to the Australian Government’s Fair Use Exceptions Paper in May 2005. The video mash-up explicitly abuses the copyright of easily referenced popular culture audio and video icons in ways currently illgeal but that should be covered by ‘fair use’. Find out more about the video here.

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Category: news segment
Topic Tags: copyright, News

A brilliant mash-up describing copy right law and fair use principles made entirely from appropriated animated Disney movies.

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Category: short film
Topic Tags: copyright, disney, fair use